An Introduction to the Works of William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare wrote 37 plays.  Most plots were borrowed from a vast variety of sources and several plays were co-authored.  Certainly, Shakespeare’s plays are best seen live, and rarely, in performance, are the plays delivered in their entirety.  Kenneth Branaugh’s Hamlet would be a noted exception.  There are many extremely difficult passages for the casual viewer to weigh through and many scenes are quite dense and peripheral to the essential plot, characterization and thematic development.  In performance every director must make difficult decisions on what to include and what to omit.  This is the undertaking at hand, to enhance the reading of the plays rather than the stage productions. What I have attempted here is to offer the essential story of the plays in Shakespeare’s original language and dialogue, allowing for a true rendering of plots, characters, themes and essential language combined with scene by scene analysis, so that the plays may be found to be both profoundly intelligible and yet readily accessible in Shakespeare’s own words. There are countless publications which analyze the various plays and many more renditions of the plays themselves.  What this volume will uniquely set out to create is a manageable reading of the plays, which will include scene by scene essential dialogue followed immediately by analysis of each and every scene, so that the plays can never really ‘get away’ from the reader in the way that they very often do with a complete rendering of the play without such frequent signposts of analysis and clarification on a scene by scene basis.  

Each play will feature an introduction to the work as a whole, before every scene is rendered in its essential dialogue.  Every scene will be followed directly by an analysis of the scene itself, and this pattern will continue, scene by scene, throughout each of the 37 five act plays.  Each play will include final thoughts on the play’s essential legacy, its place in the overall canon of Shakespeare’s complete works and suggestions for some of the most interesting clips and entire screen and stage renditions available on youtube.